“Losing things is about the familiar falling away” : Rae Klein - An Enigmatic Mesmerizing of the Senses

 Rae Klein, Bodyguard,2024-2025, oil on canvas, 80x80 inches, Courtesy of the Artist and Nicodim, Photo credit Timothy Johnson 

 

By GARY BREWER March 12, 2025

“Losing things is about the familiar falling away, getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing.” —Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

Upon entering the exhibition DOUBLECROSS at Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles, one is struck by the emotional tone of these expansive paintings. The artist Rae Klein has created a mood of dreaminess, ushering the viewer into works that mesmerize the senses, transforming our consciousness. The uncanny juxtaposition of things we know—a woman’s face, candelabras, airplanes, chandeliers, a glass pony—engages us. They suggest, in an enigmatic language, narratives that are open to interpretation. These are not surrealist inclinations but a method of transferring images from another era, things that convey a different time and place or whose usefulness has become unmoored, into haunting amalgamations of memory and imagination.

I met with the artist at a café in downtown LA to talk about her new paintings and the ideas and methods she uses to bring these poetic works into being. I asked her about her process of finding the images she uses to create her compelling paintings.

“I look for images that have lost their relevance. That have lost their context, it frees them to become something new, a new image. The absence that they contain creates a space where I can give them a new purpose and meaning.”

Rae Klein, Triple Dog, 2024, oil on linen, 72x80 inches, Courtesy of the Artist and Nicodim, Photo credit Timothy Johnson
 

In her first exhibition with Nicodim, Low Voice Out Loud (2022),  the paintings were more atmospheric. Glazes were applied in smooth, seamless veils, forming luminous fields of color with low tonal variants. She often created highlights using an airbrush, with small bright point of white mysteriously bringing out the volume and space of the forms. Her recent works have a more painterly richness to the surface. In these new paintings the brushstrokes are more apparent. The glass candelabras superimposed over a woman’s face in “You are Completely Safe II” (2024), read clearly from afar, but up close the smoky, scumbled grays become a thick, lacy filigree of shimmering white highlights. They create a visual tintinnabulation that a woman at the opening mentioned she could hear: the ringing, tinkling sound of the glass. 

There is an oblique tension between the sleeping woman’s face and the floating, shimmering objects. In this painting, Klein’s colors are subdued, the tonal contrast low, the woman’s face generalized. Upon it, the rich painterly passage of the glistening candelabras rising diagonally from left to right, suggests musical notation. It is a beautiful and beguiling work, mysterious and obvious simultaneously. 

Klein spoke about her method of finding images that intrigue her and giving them time to simmer and evolve in her subconscious. “I have thousands of images that I have collected to use in my paintings. I do not force them; I let them cook until they mature, until I know they are ready. On our flight to Los Angeles, we landed in Dallas first. As we were approaching the airport I saw these large water fountains in small lakes that were a part of a residential development. The water shooting up looked frozen from the altitude we were flying in at. It reminded me of some images of fountains that I had collected and forgotten about. Something about the moving water looking like a solid object brought back my memory of these images, and I knew that they had matured and were ready to use for a painting.” 

Rae Klein, You are Completely Safe II, 2024, oil on canvas, 80x80 inches Courtesy of the Artist and Nicodim, Photo credit Timothy Johnson
 

I asked about the painting “Bodyguard” (2024), this one with a double image of a woman’s face that looked like something from a 1970s ad. Superimposed over her face float handcuffs and other obscure implements. Klein told me, “In the painting ‘Triple Dog’ [2024] I repeated the image of a dog three times, superimposing it one on top of the other. When I started working on the design of the woman’s face, I wanted to use that repetition again; what came to mind was something menacing, like an evil doppelgänger hiding behind the face. The implements of control floating in the foreground added a sinister tone.”

The woman’s face fills the painting, her alluring gaze with parted lips erotically suggestive. Behind the contour of her face lurks a twin image that creates a subtle psychological tension. Different types of handcuffs and other devices of restraint are superimposed on the visage. Some we recognize, and others have an obscure purpose. The repetition of the handcuffs suggests eyes, masks or goggles, mirroring the eyes of the woman in an engaging formal dialogue. The soft focus and subdued palette register in our consciousness like a memory or an oblique recollection of a slightly unsettling dream.

We spoke a little about her early influences. Klein mentioned that while she was growing up, her father was an avid record collector. He used to display the cover art of the albums, designs reflecting the style, the tone and the cultural signifiers of different kinds of musical forms. “These images were my first experience with a visual art form. There is something about the juxtapositions of images and stylistic references that I think shaped some of my approach to image making. Recently I have started making square paintings that may be a reflection of the format of album covers.” 

Klein’s paintings are beautiful to behold. In them, ordinary objects transform into emotionally resonant images with an aura of enchantment. Her keen hand creates a spectral luminosity, an otherworldliness that feels like an aura of light radiating from within the paintings.

Rae Klein, Glass Pony VIII, 2024, oil on linen, 46x50 inches, Courtesy of the Artist and Nicodim, Photo credit Timothy Johnson
 

The fluid improvisational creativity that flows from her hand, laying down paint in bold gestures, and her ability to swiftly achieve a poetic image, is brilliantly achieved in “Glass Pony VIII” (2024). A luminous portrait of a glass pony in warm pale grays is surrounded by a field of deep browns with a passage of cerulean blue at the bottom that suggests water. The immediacy of the image envelops us in an aura of fairy tale logic. The face and neck are elongated; below the chin a teardrop shape with a dollop of paint suggests a shimmering crystal hanging below. The volumetric form of the head and neck is depicted in soft focus, creating a dreamy world where a child’s heart and mind could dwell. The field of dark brown is applied in swift gestural brushwork. Areas where the canvas is left bare become points of illumination: one blank area at the top of the pony’s forehead suggests the horn of a unicorn. 

Klein’s process of recognizing something compelling in an image, storing it away and letting it surface from her imagination, gives to her paintings a strange subjective resonance. These are short stories culled from the incessant flow of objects and images of our world. Her ability to transform mundane things into powerful, poetic paintings is an act of alchemy. It is a metamorphosis of the objects from this shopworn world into the mysterious ciphers of an artist’s soul. WM

Rae Klein, DOUBLECROSS, Feb. 18–April 19, 2025, 

Nicodim Gallery, 1700 S. Santa Fe Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90021